No Man's Land Read Online Free PDF Page A

it?”
    “Let’s pray he doesn’t,” the
state police captain said.
    “Here he comes,” the cameraman
shouted.
    All eyes turned to the screen, where
a sandy-haired man in a guard’s uniform was being pushed through
the central arch of the administration building, out of the shadows
into the harsh overhead lights. His gait was a stiff-legged stagger;
his face was white with fear. His hands were manacled to a wide
leather belt encircling his middle. The camera caught the clenching
and unclenching of his fingers as he walked out into the stark
artificial light, then zoomed in closer and closer until only the
portion of his blue shirt holding his badge filled the grainy screen
inside the van. The degree of magnification combined with a slight
jiggle of the camera made the numbers on the badge dance before their
straining eyes.
    “One seven three four five,”
somebody finally read out loud. Elias Romero repeated the numbers
into his cell phone and waited for Iris Cruz, who was back at the
command center, to look up the number.
    They were parked on the grass, hard
along the left side of the main gate, just as Driver had ordered. One
remote truck providing the video feed for the multitude of media
outlets now lining Boundary Road, the access road to the prison, a
quarter mile to the east. Only the cameraman was outside, shooting
the man standing in the prison’s front courtyard from a distance of
seventy yards. He had his camera pressed hard against the chain-link
fence. Above his head, massive coils of razor wire garnished the
fences for as far as the eye could see. The air smelled of dust and
steel. The manacled guard stood motionless. Movement could be
detected within the deep shadows of the arch. He seemed to turn his
head to listen. Seemed to nod in agreement before dropping to his
knees. His face knew.
    “Cartwright, Wally A.” Iris
Cruz’s voice pulled Elias Romero’s attention from the wavering
picture of the kneeling guard. “Single white male. Only been on
duty for a month and a half. Still on probation.”
    His given name was Waldo Arens
Cartwright. He’d been named after his only reputable uncle, a
steely-eyed beet farmer with a jaw like a bass, who, having had the
great misfortune to have stepped on a land mine on only his second
day in Vietnam, had thus earned a place of honor in the sparsely
populated Cartwright family wall of fame, where he now rested in
perpetuity on the north wall of Aunt Betty’s dining room. As the
name Waldo seemed to attract derision in much the same manner in
which a spring flower attracts the bee, the war hero’s namesake
had, early on, made certain that he was always known as Wally. The
way Wally figured it, life was hard enough without asking for
trouble, so he’d used Wally on his job application.
    Ten minutes ago, Wally had been
sitting on the bench in front of his locker scraping the last of the
chicken gravy from the plastic plate with a crust of bread. Some of
the guys hadn’t eaten at all. Nerves, Wally guessed. Being held
hostage affected some guys that way. As for Wally, way he saw it, a
meal was a meal. The locker room had been crowded. The takeover had
happened right at shift change, when there weren’t more than two
dozen officers walking the cellblocks. Everybody else was either
coming or going. The guys on duty had been rounded up and stuck in
the locker room with both shifts. The duty sergeant had run the
roster for both shifts and, lo and behold, nobody was missing. The
announcement sent a shiver of hope through the hundred or so
corrections officers. Maybe they were all going to come through this.
Maybe the inmates were going to go through the standard list of
demands, then it would be over and they could all get back to their
lives. Maybe.
    When the door was flung open and a
half dozen inmates armed with everything from Mac 10s to a machete
strode into the room silence settled like a mantle. Spoons stopped in
midair, mouths hung open as a pair of Bikers